Even Ed Brayton finds fault with Judge Jones' "true religion" speech

I and others have severely condemned the following statement made by Judge John E. Jones III in a commencement speech at Dickinson College:

. . . .this much is very clear. The Founders believed that true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible, but was to be found through free, rational inquiry. At bottom then, this core set of beliefs led the Founders, who constantly engaged and questioned things, to secure their idea of religious freedom by barring any alliance between church and state.

In two posts and their associated comments, here and here, Ed "It's my way or the highway" Brayton conceded the following points contradicting Jones' preceding statement:

(1) The first sentence in Jones' statement above is "too broad" -- a gross understatement.

(2) In regard to the second sentence above, the religious beliefs of a given Founder are not an indicator of whether or not he supported the establishment clause.

Regarding the first point above, Ed favorably cited a recent book about the religious beliefs of the Founders. In regard to the second point, Ed said,

. . . . .whether a given founding father was a Christian or not doesn't tell us anything about his position on separation of church and state.

Also, I think that all of this worship of the founding fathers is going to create a backlash against them. We should certainly pay attention to their ideas, as we should pay attention to all reasonable ideas, but for various reasons we should not blindly follow the Founders' ideas. "Originalism" is itself a kind of "judicial activism."

I am not out of the woods yet in regard to computer problems. I was able to partially fix an old computer by using a restorer CD from my latest computer, but the restoration left me stuck with the very coarse obsolete CGA graphics (640X480 pixels or something like that -- the resolution control is disabled), so my display is of course very poor. However, at least I can now with difficulty make posts and comments on my blog.